If Obama Wants To Run Big Business, Maybe He’d Better Recruit Some People With Experience
It’s funny (when it’s not scary) to watch the Obama administration make a foray into the private sector by essentially canning the CEO of General Motors and demanding the authority to take over any company the President decides a) isn’t too important to the economy to fail and b) isn’t being run property by its current management. Obama seems to think that his administration, and not the private sector, should be managing America’s businesses.
One wonders why he thinks that, when pretty much nobody in his administration has any experience actually running a business per this Politico article from over a month ago:
In President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, there is a Nobel Prize winner, a former mayor and a veteran CIA agent. Surrounding him in the White House West Wing are a former four-star general, one of the nation’s most eminent economists and a handful of this generation’s most talented political operatives.
This constellation of talent, however, has something of a black hole. There is virtually no one on Obama’s team with outsized achievements or a high-profile reputation earned in the world of business.
There are no former CEOs in the Obama Cabinet. And among the people who make up his daily inner circle, there is only a dollop or two of top-level private sector experience.
This is a notable absence, particularly for an administration whose domestic reputation will hinge on whether it can reverse one of the steepest economic downturns in decades. Most recent administrations — Democratic as well as Republican — have included several people who were bold-faced names in the corporate world before assuming influential jobs in Washington.
I don’t think the government can run the private sector effectively even if it had a cadre of talented, experienced business people at the helm. And even if it could, what guarantees would we have that the next administration could do it?
This is why we’ve always left the economy in the hands of the private sector. Obama is changing all that, and it’s not for the better.
